Many business owners have heard that if they want to hire the most competent and talented employees, they need to relocate to New York City or San Francisco. That simply isn’t true. There is tremendous untapped talent all over the world — you just need to know where, and how, to look.

Related: 5 Ways to Effectively Lead Remote Teams

I’ve always gravitated toward location-independent business models that allow me the freedom to move and travel to new places (including Asia, where I started my first company). My current company has four full-time employees and ten part-time contractors, all of whom work remotely. Our team is based both internationally and stateside, and members live in Chile, Vermont, Manhattan, Brooklyn, Chicago, Portland and other places.

In my experience, the following benefits of building a remote team far outweigh the challenges:

1.Specialization

By hiring remote workers, we get access to experts located all over the world, at a fraction of the cost of hiring a full-time employee from an expensive city like New York or San Francisco.

Also, we try to find “moonlighters” who are looking for part-time work, but have a full-time job as an expert in their field. As a result, we benefit from the knowledge transfer and training the employee is receiving at his or her full-time job.

2. Elasticity

Since most of our team is part-time, members don’t rely on us for their primary income. If we are busy, we can request more hours, or if we don’t need a specific service, we can scale down the workload and decrease costs.

3. Lower cost structure

My company is a bootstrapped startup that has had to make due with limited resources. I attribute our survival and success in part to the fact that we built a remote workforce.

By hiring contractors, you too can lower your payroll taxes, insurance costs and general overhead costs, like office space.

Related: Collaboration Tools of the Most Productive Remote Teams

4. Employee satisfaction

Our team members are able to work whenever and wherever they want. This allows them to take more vacations, travel and work when and from wherever they feel most productive.

I’m a big believer that location-independent businesses are the future of work and that most companies can benefit from building a remote workforce. However, I’d be lying if I said that this approach doesn’t come with its own unique challenges. That being said, through trial and error, I’ve developed solutions for some of the most common pain points associated with remote workforces:

5. Solutions for common paint points

Embracing a remote philosophy — Building a remote workforce means giving up control, to an extent. Many business owners rely on their presence in the office — and their ability to drop in on employees’ offices or cubicles unannounced — as a motivating factor to keep employees on task. Obviously, that isn’t possible when your team is spread throughout the country or world.

The single easiest way to give up control is to hire the right talent. Seek out employees who are motivated by doing great work, not by appeasing a hovering boss. Finding this type of employee takes longer, but it’s worth it.

Once you hire talented, self-sufficient and self-motivated workers, it is essential that you give them autonomy and motivate them to do their best work. Resist the urge to micromanage and remove bottlenecks that slow down or complicate their ability to get their work done. Provide employees with only the information they need to fulfill their responsibilities, and create clearly defined systems and processes so there’s no confusion about which employees interface with one other, and when.

For example, our content publishing process has clearly defined steps and responsibilities outlined for our writers, designers and content manager. This system allows us to publish more and better content faster without running into unnecessary roadblocks.

Fostering Communication –– One of the biggest challenges we still face as a remote team is making sure everyone understands our high-level goals, mission and vision of the company. It’s easy for employees to lose sight of their purpose when they’re working from home and not surrounded by a supportive team.

As CEO, my job is to remind my employees of the common goal we’re working toward, and why it’s important. Not only do I need to manage day-to-day activities, I also have to preach our vision and mission, so my team doesn’t get discouraged or lose sight of what we’re all working together to accomplish.

Creating accountability — Accountability can also be an issue for remote teams: As I mentioned, staying motivated can be difficult when there’s no boss or manager physically checking in on you. In the past, I have struggled with getting teams to adopt project management systems that allow them to update me on their progress and stay accountable. Adopting a project management system is something you must commit to as a team, especially in a remote culture.

Putting together a good tool set:

Good tools are essential for remote startup work. My own recommended list includes:

• Slack, for sending quick messages and managing all company communication in one place
• Basecamp, for tracking projects and assigning to-dos
• Gmail, for its various handy email features
• Google Stack, especially its Docs, Calendar and Hangouts features for easy sharing and collaboration on assets and content
• Skype, for video calls
• Working On, to share what each team member is working on in real time
• 15Five, for weekly communication on team member progress as well as a boost for morale, challenges and more
• Weekly Meetings, for bringing team members together to talk, even though we’re scattered around the world

Hiring and managing a team of remote workers can be challenging, but at this point, I can’t imagine running my business any other way. With the number of technological innovations and tools out there that enable geographically disparate teams to communicate with and update each other quickly and easily, there’s no reason why most businesses can’t make this model work.

Related: 4 Effective Ways to Manage a Remote Team

Posted by Seth Godin on December 04, 2015

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I once asked Mitch Kapor how he stayed productive. The tech veteran smiled and showed me an elaborate Microsoft Word document he used to keep track of all the people, places and projects in his life with keyboard shortcuts to move information around, so he’d know what to do when. Seeing him in action with it was a marvel, because for him, that document was clearly the best tool for the job.

Productivity has become something of an obsession for me over the last 20 years, first as an investment category at Menlo Ventures but increasingly as a personal need for myself, juggling professional goals with aspirations to be the best husband, father and friend I can be. I’ve drawn from experts and executives I’ve worked with over the years to crystallize my own approach into five essential principles.

Related: Become a Productivity Monster by Eliminating These 5 Time-Wasting Habits

1. Start with a prioritized plan.

If you start your day reacting to inbound requests, you’ll seldom go home with a real sense of accomplishment. Taking just a few minutes each morning to identify your day’s top goals and holding yourself accountable for completing them can dramatically impact the effectiveness of your day.

This isn’t to say priorities should be unbendable. My mentor and hero Steve Blank says it best adapting a famous military adage: “No plan survives first contact with customers.” An iterative, feedback-rich refinement process leads to optimal product, and your day should be no different. Optimize it by shifting priorities as needed and pushing some things off until later to maintain focus on what’s most important.

Prioritization scales across teams with profound results. Uber, the best executing company I’ve ever worked with, went from operating in one city to over 300 within five years. That would have been impossible without a meticulously sequenced playbook, and thoughtful leaders like Travis and Austin Geidt ensuring the most effective practices are learned, codified and replicated into a prioritized plan for each role.

2. Work off a to-do list, not out of an inbox.

Psychologist George Miller observed that most people can only remember about seven chunks of unrelated information. If you have more than seven to-dos in life, you come to rely on external systems for memory assistance. Too often, our e-mail or Slack inbox become our default systems, but since they are mostly populated by others’ requests, our personal agendas get starved out.

A to-do system should meet three criteria: 1. Your attention must return to it consistently, 2. It shouldn’t interrupt your important work and 3. It should be low friction to maintain. Cooley attorney Mark Tanoury keeps his to-do list in an email draft. Fellow Menlo partner John Jarve uses a legal pad with a system of stars. They’re two of the most effective people I know. The system matters less than your consistency in using it.

Related: The 7 Rules of Personal Productivity

3. Avoid multitasking.

“To do two things at once is to do neither.” — Publilius Syrus

For years, I labored under the illusion that multi-tasking helped me get things get done faster. But research shows we actually lose time and cognitive energy switching contexts. University of California Irvine professor Gloria Mark estimates an average of 23 minutes elapses before getting back on task.

Good To Great author Jim Collins is famous for going into “Monk Mode,” tuning out the world for several months while digesting and synthesizing information into a profound set of insights. While most executives can’t take months-long sabbaticals, they can still follow the Pomodoro method of focusing in 25 minute segments, or schedule inbox triage into three separate chunks.

4. Touch things once — and practice saying, “No thanks.”

When you pick up a piece of paper, act on it immediately or throw it away: This idea was first popularized decades ago, but the underlying principle is still applicable in the digital era. For messages or requests requiring your action which you can’t deal with immediately, turn them into to-dos, schedule time to work on them or delegate them to someone who can. Otherwise, reading and re-reading messages will cost you hours per week.

Related advice comes from Steve Jobs: “Focus is saying no to 1,000 good ideas.” Steve recognized the extremely limited bandwidth we each have in life, mandating thoughtful focus on few projects to make a real difference.

I realized this in a very personal way after founding Handle while still serving as a partner at Menlo Ventures. As much as I love the Menlo team and investing at the frontiers of technology, dividing focus between Menlo, running a company and spending time with my family was not giving anyone my best — leaving me an empty vessel, sometimes in tears as I commuted. As difficult a decision as it was, I took leave from Menlo to throw my professional weight behind my own startup.

5. Maintain your productivity habit every day — because today is all you have.

“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then is not an act but a habit.” — Aristotle

In The Power of Habit, Charles Duhigg observes how quickly we deplete our finite daily supply of willpower in trying to stay productive in the face of incoming distractions. Habits, once in place, are transformative. Brushing teeth, exercising and tackling hard tasks first all may be hard habits to start, but once they are formed, they get hard-wired into our brain.

For many of us, our default habit is showing up at work and allocating time based on the top messages in our inbox. Our good intentions and aspirations only manifest when we move towards them with our own thoughtful actions.

Even after devoting years of my work life to solving the productivity problem, I still live up to this standard far less often than I wish I did. But I’ll never give up. Because in the end, productivity isn’t just about being better at work. It’s about finding the time and being emotionally present for our favorite people and passions.

“Yesterday is gone. Tomorrow has not yet come. We have only today. Let us begin.” — Mother Teresa

Related: 11 Tweaks to Your Daily Routine Will Make Your Day More Productive

A lot of people spend their days in the office passing the time and not really achieving much. Often, that’s not their fault. The culture of working “9-to-5” runs deep in the world of business. So, it’s easy to do a lot of fake work that yields few results. Instead, people should focus only on those tasks that actually achieve something.

Related: Become a Productivity Monster by Eliminating These 5 Time-Wasting Habits

According to the Pareto Principle, 80 percent of the effects come from 20 percent of our work. So, the question becomes, how do we determine what that 20 percent is that we actually have to do?

To answer that question, let’s first identify a definition for fake work: According to Rodger Dean Duncan: Fake work is work “not explicitly aligned with the strategies and goals of the organization.“ So, to do profitable work, you have to understand how the things you do align with your company’s goals. Here are five criteria toward that understanding.

1. Align your tasks.

Make sure that everything you do fits into your workplace quarterly or yearly goals. One of the best ways for goal alignment is using the concept of Objectives and Key Results (OKRs). First introduced by Intel, OKRs have gained a lot of popularity (for instance, Google uses them).

You must first have clear goals outlined at the company level; then, personal goals that directly related to them, can be set.

2. Prioritize.

Once your goals are aligned, it’s easier to decide what’s important and what’s not. Spending most of your time and energy on doing the important things (tasks that give you meaningful results), lets you maximize the effects of the Pareto Principle.

3. Ask for and give feedback.

The only way to actually distinguish what’s real work and what’s fake is to understand what goes on in your particular workplace. That requires exchanging ideas with both your manager and co-workers.

In this regard, it’s helpful to have a good internal communication system in place. Whether that means a system of regular meetings, the use of status reporting software or some other enterprise network service and talking and sharing ideas to make sure the work you do matters is a must.

Related: The 7 Rules of Personal Productivity

4. Divide your days into blocks of meaningful work.

In the office environment, we’re too often distracted by coworkers, emails and random outside factors. A friend of mine use to go to work every Saturday, because, “It’s quiet and I can focus on my work.” Some of these distractions are things we can’t avoid, but we must still try to have some level of control.

To get things done, try dividing your day into uninterrupted blocks of work. During these blocks, ignore your email, messengers and, if possible, even your phone. Some distractions can’t be avoided, but minimizing their amount still helps, as multitasking decreases productivity by 40 percent.

5. Take breaks.

When you experience — as we all do — energy levels dropping throughout the day and week, you may find it easy to take the easy way out: Sit at your desk, answer emails and daydream about the weekend.

In that context, it’s important to pace yourself so you don’t expend all your energy on Monday morning. Taking regular breaks from mental tasks improves productivity and creativity; skipping breaks, however, can lead to stress and exhaustion.

Avoiding fake work requires a companywide commitment. One person can do only so much. If you believe your company is not doing enough to be productive, make that clear to your supervisors, as they likely want to be more successful as well.

What ideas do you have for achieving that productivity goal?

Related: 11 Tweaks to Your Daily Routine Will Make Your Day More Productive